THE ESSENTIAL COLUMBIA

I find it hard to narrow down Columbia to certain essential places because it's such a diverse environment. I can however tell you which places have meant the most to me in my time here.

My first year here at Columbia, I ran into a friend from high school who'd gone to a different school to study fine art. She asked me almost immediately, "do you like the people in your major?" She told me she'd grown to despise most of her peers. Truthfully, I answered her original question with "yes". In fact, I loved the Fiction Writing Department and the people in it. For this reason, when I think of Columbia, my first thought is the Fiction Department, on the 12th floor of the 624 S. Michigan building. The Fiction Department is generally a quiet place, except for the flow of students at the beginning and end of any of the four hour classes, or when a group of grad students huddle together on break. People regularly camp out on the plum couches scattered outside the faculty offices at laptops and with groups of friends. Sitting there today, it struck me just how correct the atmosphere is. In less than a half an hour, I had no less than three passing, awkward moments with people. The different departments at Columbia really do seem to feel like tribes or families at times, where people of similar personalities share common interests. The Fiction Department is a tribe of the neurotic weirdos and I love it.

Film Row Cinema is the auditorium and the surrounding area on the eighth floor of the 1104 Wabash building, probably my favorite Columbia building from an aesthetic viewpoint. I know we were asked to actually visit these places but unfortunately this was not possible with this particular space, as I learned a few semesters ago when I wrote about the 1104 building for another class. A far as I can tell, the eighth floor is not accessible by elevator unless there is an event going on there. This is a shame, since it's an amazing space and would be a great spot to study or take a lunch break. The Fiction Department's Story Week festival holds many of its readings and events there, which is how I first became acquainted with it. The auditorium itself holds a lot of good memories for me. There's no time of the year you feel more connected to the department than during Story Week, and there's something great about getting together with a bunch of other Fiction majors to talk about writing and listen to great work. Outside of the auditorium and outside of memory, the surrounding space is incredible. There is a window which stretches around three sides of the building and provides a widescreen panorama of the near city skyline and the lake.

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY

In 2005, Dave Chappelle abandoned the third season of his smash hit Comedy Central series, turned down a $50 million deal and fled for Africa. Was he crazy? Paranoid? On drugs? These were the questions from the press he returned to and despite his protests, once he began to recede from public life the story seemed to become that Dave Chappelle had lost both his best shot at greatness and his mind.

In answering the question of why Chappelle chose to leave his show, there is perhaps no more enlightening document than the concert film he made the year before with Michel Gondry, Dave Chappelle's Block Party. It is also an excellent document of Chappelle's passion and humanity, something which was overshadowed upon its release in 2006 by the controversy surrounding his escape from stardom.

The film begins in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the unlikely place Dave Chappelle calls home. Yellow Springs is where he spent his childhood, but as he gleefully traverses the town, handing out tickets and chatting up its residents, it's easy to see why he came back. He pays a visit to a shop whose salesperson remarks to the camera that, despite his fame and fortune, she treats Dave like any other customer, a fact which Chappelle cites as an example of why he lives there in the first place.

The tickets are to a "block party", which is more like a one-day dream music festival, what Chappelle calls "the concert [he] always wanted to see". Chappelle hosts his block party in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, which is (depending on who you ask) one of the likeliest candidates as the birthplace of hip-hop. Blocks from where Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls and many of the film's own performers grew up, there seems to be no more fitting a location for the concert.

Among the strange scenery of the neighborhood is the "Broken Angel House", owned by an eccentric couple united by premonition to renovate the decaying building into some kind of inner-city funhouse. The couple's story is interesting, but the long stretch of the film centered on them and the house (with only that minimal payoff towards the end of the film) seems to be an indulgence of Gondry, though this is purely speculation. Otherwise, little would indicate that Gondry was responsible for the film, besides the occasional stylistic cue, like the playfully animated opening credits sequence. This is a good thing; Gondry is a fine director but his surrealist style would seem ill-suited to a hip-hop concert film, and thankfully he seems to approach the project with a certain personal distance.

On a wet afternoon a few days past the film's starting point, the golden ticket recipients from Yellow Springs and hundreds of internet-alerted fans board buses aimed at Brooklyn, mostly unaware of what to expect from the day. The line-up, as it turns out, is just as superb as Chappelle promised: Kanye West, The Roots, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Common, Dead Prez, the miraculously reunited Fugees, and more.

Kanye is on first. It was discussed in class whether he would have been first up today like he was in 2004. I'm inclined to agree that he would have. His star power and his ego were already large by then but he was amongst a group of people who he must have had the utmost respect for, and called there by the man who'd put him on TV performing for the first time the same year. One of the film's many magical moments is seeing the college marching band Chappelle brought from Yellow Springs performing "Jesus Walks" for an excited Kanye.

The performances throughout the day are stunning. Mos Def and Talib Kweli naturally jump in and out of each others' impressive sets. Dead Prez play a blistering set while Chappelle talks about his desire to put controversial but honest artists in the forefront. Erykah Badu gives a powerful performance, stripping off her hair mid-song as Chappelle ruminates appropriately about the place where an artist's personal and private selves meet.

The performances throughout the film are presented without fuss, allowed enough space to breath but cleverly edited and weaved in with Chappelle's narrative and philosophy when appropriate. There's a palpable sense of fun to the entire thing. The Roots' Questlove heroically and improbably drums his way through every single performance, often with a smile on his face. In one memorable scene, he convinces Erykah Badu to emerge from backstage and duet spontaneously with Jill Scott on the Roots' "You Got Me".

As the Fugees perform at the end of the day–reunited for one night by Chappelle–Lauryn Hill asks the audience where they've been, only to be asked where she's been. "That's where I've been," she answers to the cameras, pointing to her infant son offstage. Like Dave, Hill disappeared from the public eye at the height of her success, bringing endless rumors and speculation. But the answer to where she's been is as simple and understandable as that. It was predictable to blame Chappelle's escape from stardom on any number of personal problems but the answer, like Lauryn Hill's, was much more logical and boring.

During his 2005 appearance on "Inside the Actor's Studio", in promotion of Block Party, Chappelle told the audience that he likes to connect with other people, and that money and fame require you to put up walls around yourself, something he never wanted to do. In Block Party, we see the simple joy Chappelle clearly gets from interacting with people and making them happy, and it becomes clear why he was so afraid of losing it. Besides infrequent stand-up appearances and an occasional interview, Block Party was Chappelle's last creative endeavor to see release since he left his show. I'm sure it's not the last we've seen of him, but I can't help but think that however he's spending his time out of the spotlight, he's enjoying it.

TAYLOR SWIFT

To be perfectly honest, I had no idea who Taylor Swift was until Kanye West showed up. If you'd asked me, I would have made a broad guess that she was another Disney-built pop tween. There was good reason for this - I was far outside her audience. But once the ball of controversy began rolling, her scope began to expand and before I knew it, she was unavoidable. And that's when I started to hate her.

At first, it had less to do with her and more to do with the media's wild overreaction to the Kanye incident. What should have been a silly and memorable awards show moment was transformed into a traumatic national incident, the process of which throbbing with an intense but strictly unacknowledged undercurrent of racism.

To put it mildly, the media's reaction pissed me off. In the year after the incident, Swift rode the wave of anti-Kanye vitriol to superstardom and did nothing to quell the overreaction. Her 2010 album Speak Now even features a weepy ballad to a thinly veiled subject, forgiving Kanye for his crime, which is treated with all the grim seriousness of a rape.

My love for Kanye West may bias me in judging Taylor Swift, but I've found far more troubling elements to her music in the two years since I became aware of her. Swift is championed by critics and public alike for a number of reasons: she is a young woman who plays an instrument and writes her own songs, and she represents a more positive role model to young girls than most pop stars today. The first point is one I could argue but I will not - concerns about authenticity in pop music are inherently foolish and Swift's songs are just as obsessively studio polished as any current day pop song - but the second one is really worth taking a look at.

The further you look into her music, you begin to realize that Taylor Swift is a feminist's nightmare. Feminist culture site Autostraddle did a remarkable analysis of Swift's music last year, one which is far deeper than I have the space to tackle here and well worth a read. The basic points are this: Taylor Swift, an adult woman, often take the perspective of an innocent, disempowered teenager. Her songwriting relies on repetitive, tired, teen romance imagery. She claims "outcast" status despite being beautiful and seemingly loved by everyone. And most importantly, her songs are almost always about boys and how their love will make any girl's life complete, and rarely ever about other girls unless she is slut-shaming them.

Listening to Speak Now, I was surprised at just how much Swift had grown, in comparisons to the songs I'd heard from her last album. She no longer seemed quite so obsessed with teen romance and more in tune with adult issues - the title track's wedding day drama could be seen as a deliberate attempt at aging Swift's image out of high school. I can't say the music isn't palatable either - her voice is lovely and the tunes are wonderfully catchy. Despite all this, her songs still strike me as overly passive and boy-crazy. The sarcastic quips and giggles of "Better Than Revenge" are refreshing, but she falls back into familiar tropes with lyrics about what the other girl "does on the mattress" and equating her with a bully on the playground stealing toys. "Never Grow Up" is a desperate plea to a little girl to stay a child forever, as Swift apparently wishes she could have.

The realization I came to while listening to Taylor Swift's music is that, as much as I may disagree with the way she portrays life and the messages she sends to young girls, I am in the minority. In fact, laying out all the above facts, things which I deem ugly and indicting, would only reaffirm to many parents why Swift is exactly the kind of role model they want for their daughters.

Ever since she was thrust into the spotlight on live TV, Taylor Swift has been both lauded and condemned. I can't see myself ever agreeing with the image she portrays, but I think I can understand why so many people reject the hedonism of artists like Kanye West and embrace the wholesome idealism of Taylor Swift. I guess I'm just too cynical to go for it.